Apple Comes On Top In Mobile PC Sales For The Year 2011, Thanks To The iPad

It would seem that Apple are on a solo mission to single-handedly conquer and dominate every market that they choose to enter. I am pretty sure they could take any mediocre product, apply their own engineering magic, then slap an Apple logo on it and turn it into massively saleable item all around the world. Their unique attention to detail, design and marketing seems to ensure that every product they release achieves huge success time and time again.

Due to recent successes, when consumers talk about Apple more often than not, it is about the iPhone or iPad as they are the two items which gain the most press and fly off the shelves the most. It is worth remembering though that the company also has a fantastic range of Macs which are rapidly growing in popularity which a recent report from NPD DisplaySearch shows. It may seem surprising, but if you include the iPad as a mobile PC, then Apple finished ahead of all competition not only in the final quarter of 2011 but also throughout the whole year.

Apple shipped approximately 23.4 million MacBooks and iPads in the final quarter of last year which helped raise the yearly total to over 62.8 million units. The numbers are pretty impressive, but we will do well to remember that 80 percent of those mobile units sold were in fact iPads which came in at around the 18.7 million mark in Q4 alone and totaling 48.4 million for the entire calendar year.

The other big players in the industry – HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo – filled out the top five vendors of the year with unit sales of 8.7, 6.9, 6.8 and 6.3 million respectively. We must remember though that if we removed the iPad from the Apple range, their MacBook sales for the same quarter would have come in at around 4.7 million units putting them in fifth place in that list.

On an industry level, Q4 mobile PC sales grew by an impressive twelve percent, equating to a 44 percent rise of the year, finally resting at about 88 million units in total. When dealing specifically in notebooks, the market was left trailing behind by HP who shipped 8.7 million devices with Dell, Acer and Lenovo playing catch up. As mentioned above, Apple would have been left lagging in fifth place purely on notebook sales but still managed higher shipments than that of ASUS and Toshiba.

When dealing solely in tablets, Apple finished Q4 2011 with a 59.1 percent share of the market with Amazon being in second place thanks to their range of Kindle devices. Amazon managed to ship 5.3 million units in total in Q4 equating to a 16.7 percent market share with Samsung managing to get 2.1 million tablets out the door.